What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet
businesses and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How do they make decisions both at their companies and in their
personal lives? And what makes their businesses tick? Today, I'm talking to Joel Gascoigne,
the founder of Buffer. Joel, welcome to the show, and thanks for joining me.
Thanks, Cortland. Really excited to be on here. I love IndieHackers and everything you're doing,
and I've listened to several different episodes of podcasts and yeah, great information being
shared. So hopefully, I can share some good stuff as well.
I'm really excited to have you here as well. Buffer is a social media platform. It's used by
hundreds of thousands of businesses, including mine. I use Buffer every day for IndieHackers.
And you started the company in 2010, and since then, you've gone on to grow your revenue to close
to $18 million annually, which is pretty amazing. Can you tell us a little bit about what Buffer
is and why so many people are using it? Thanks. Yeah, absolutely. So Buffer is a
social media management platform for small businesses. And our big focus along the way
is being social media publishing. So we really help customers to share content on social media
so sharing tweets and Facebook posts. And there's a bunch of functionality we have to let you
schedule those posts or do everything you need to share the right content at the right time,
things. And then we also have products that let you do analysis on the impact of your efforts
there. So we have a social analytics product called Buffer Analyze as well. And we have a
social customer service product as well. And we're really passionate ourselves about providing
really great customer service. And so we have Buffer Reply, which helps you to engage your
customers, your audience and respond to them in a timely manner on Facebook, Twitter and other
social networks. And yeah, when we started in 2010, we have had a mixture of being comfortable
and raise some funding as well. And we today, as you mentioned, we're pretty much right at
$18 million in annual revenue. We're about 70 people right now. And we are profitable and
generating about $300 to $400K in net profit per month currently. So yeah.
That's a ton of products. And I think one of the cool things to me about Buffer is that you're not
just putting a lot of time and effort into innovating on your products, but you also put
a lot of time and effort into innovating with your company itself. You've experimented a lot
with hiring, with having an entirely remote distributed team, with being transparent about
revenue and salaries, not having managers, etc. And you're trying out a lot of this stuff like
before it was cool, you know, six or seven years ago. Why do that? Why not just follow
sort of the established playbook for how to build a company so you have more energy to focus
on your product and your revenue growth? Yeah, that's a great question. And thanks. Yeah,
it's been a fun journey. I think really it comes from like, why do a lot of people start a company
and they often start a company because they have some experiences they've had in the past,
or they have some things where they want more freedom or more flexibility. And those things
were all true for me. I had had a previous bad experience being at a company that I worked for.
I was only really working part time for them. So the impact on me was not too great. But they
essentially went bankrupt. And a lot of people lost months of pay. And I came, I lost a little
bit of pay through that as well. But I didn't come out too bad. But you know, there was really a lack
of transparency around that whole situation. And it left me feeling like, wow, if everyone knew
the situation we were truly in, maybe that whole company could have pulled together and got through
that. That's just one example. And then, you know, I also always dreamed of just generally more freedom
to travel and do certain things. And so those are all things I think, personally, for me, went into
like, okay, I'm gonna start this company and try and bring about those things. And then, you know,
once you actually get into it, that's where it gets hard, right? Because you, you know, you might
describe, maybe you get investors on board or just the general normal way of things is,
is probably to focus far more on the growth aspects and the customer, the market, the products and
things. And that's great. And we have a huge focus on on that. But we've worked pretty hard to retain
the other aspects as well and try to kind of innovate and experiment and just question the
norms and say, you know, what, how should things be? How could things be better? I really believe
that the way businesses work days kind of, there's a lot of layers and layers of, of different kind
of, you know, the way it's done type things that just build up. And, and that's the result of what
we have today for a lot of companies, how that runs. So we try to break apart those things and
question and say, you know, how should it be now? Well, what would we often say within the team,
like we're striving to create a workplace of the future? So what would a workplace of the future
really look like? And can we experiment and push ourselves and try things and some things work out,
some things don't. But generally with this goal towards also innovating on our culture and
workplace and creating a really positive and inspiring, inclusive and productive culture
that everyone's excited to be part of for the long term. I really like what you said about
sort of reacting to the experiences that you've had in the past and also living up to the goals
that you've had for yourself and for Buffet for creating a company that you actually want to work
on. Because I think every entrepreneur when they start has some vision of what they want their life
to be like. They have some actual goals they're striving for. And there's something about the
difficulty of the journey itself where it's easy to lose sight of that. And you end up building a
company that five years later, you look up and like, you don't even like working there. You're
doing things that you don't enjoy doing. And it's so easy to do that. So it's a lot of respect for
the fact that you've been able to make a lot of hard decisions and build a culture that, for better
or for worse, is what you wanted it to be. Thanks. Yeah, I appreciate that. I think it's
really important for founders to, once in a while, just stop and reflect and question, like,
you know, are you still staying true to some of those things? And maybe those goals change over
time. And that's fine too. But I think it is important to take a step back time to time and
say, like, is this, are you still enjoying this, like, showing up to work at this place and be
part of this? And also, like, something I've done a couple of different times in the journey is just
to try and extrapolate out the current trends of where the company is heading and see, okay,
where are we going to be in a couple of years from now? Is that a place that I want to,
am I going to enjoy waking up in the morning and being part of that and working there? And,
you know, at times, sometimes it starts to drift in a direction that is no longer aligned with
those goals and values and things that you have. And then it's time to make some changes. And
sometimes those can be tough, right? Yeah, I think trying to predict the future is an underrated
activity. Like, not many of us spend time thinking about what life's going to be like two years from
now. And it's not easy to do and get it right, but it's worth trying to do. Yeah, absolutely.
Anyway, going from some zero to $18 million a year in revenue is a pretty significant journey.
But let's start by talking about you and what you're up to before you started Buffer. What was
it like growing up as Joel Gascoigne? And what are some of the things from your childhood that
have influenced the person that you are today? Yeah, so I'm British. I grew up in the UK. And
I was in a city called Sheffield for most of my childhood, which is, I think it's like the fourth
largest city in the UK, somewhere around that. And it's about an hour from Manchester. And I grew
up there from most of my childhood other than three and a half years where I lived in Japan
as a child growing up and from the age of about four to seven. And so that had a pretty big impact
on me. And I think, you know, I made some friends and I went off to Japan and, you know,
you know, lost touch with a lot of them and have new friends in Japan and new experiences. And my
parents threw me into a Japanese nursery in school and I had to learn Japanese from scratch.
And then, you know, had friends and I had certain experiences, like I got bullied for being
foreigner, they have a word in Japan, gaijin. So I got called that quite a lot. That's certainly
these experiences. And then came back to the UK and, you know, had to try and make new friends and
reconnect with friends. And I obviously was not happy with my parents and make me
leave all my friends in Japan as well. But I think when I look back on it in hindsight, like, you
know, 10, 20 years later, I realized how powerful that was for me and how awesome that was. And
it's a very special part of my kind of life now is Japan, Japanese, and I've been able to keep up
language in some ways and things like that. So that's one thing. And then, you know, after that,
growing up, I, a couple of interesting things, I think generally had a good childhood, but I also
had some challenging parts of it. And so I'm a pretty extreme introvert. And I struggled a lot
in like, you know, high school and generally in education settings. So I feel like I personally
believe that back then, at least I think it's still the case, education systems are really
designed against introverts, you know, you, from the moment you get to school, you're in a
classroom of 30 kids. And, and so it's a group setting, it's not great for introverts. And then
once you're finished a couple of classes, you're, you know, in your free time. And, you know,
everyone is just hanging out with each other. And so you can't really also get in time. So I think
I didn't understand it at the time. And this is really a really big struggle. And then over time,
I learned a lot about myself through that, in terms of my being an introvert and what that means
and managing my energy levels and being able to recharge by having times myself and things.
But I definitely struggle with that. And I was super drained at times, like on a daily basis,
and God kind of bullied and had some fights and things just due to that, which I think
on reflection was really just me being socially ingrained and just struggling in that environment.
And yeah, I think, interestingly for me, when I think about that, that is also what led me to
online gaming being a big part of my kind of life growing up. And because I would have these
experiences at school, and then just kind of go home and kind of have this whole other world and
other friends and things that I would kind of enter into. And that's where a lot of my joy came
from in some of those years that I had challenges. But yeah, I think around maybe 10, 11 years old,
I got into video games and stuff. I mean, all through childhood, really. But especially
like around 10, 11, I got a PC and would play like Age of Empires and some games like this,
and then I started playing them online. And I met some people as like, you know,
chat rooms and lobbies and where people hang out and stuff and set up games with each other and
just chat and things. So I just like hang out there and meet people and then like, you know,
there's teams that form clans. And so I joined one of those, I eventually ended up starting my own
one of those. And so that's kind of one thing that I remember, like, I was 12 years old, and I had
this clan that I started and there was 50 people in it at one point. And I look back on it, like
years later, and oh, that was kind of that was that was an organization, we had like, trials of
the game, you had to like, beat someone else in the clan to become part of the clan. And it's like
a lot of really interesting things from that. But that's where I first started to learn about
programming and web design and things as well. So after a while, kind of I realized that it would be
really valuable for the for the clan to have a website, just to be able to share news and
communicate and things like that. So I built a website, but it was literally just with
angel fire, those like angel fire and geocities. And I use those to basically create a website
without having to code anything. But those tools let you jump into the code and see what's going
on. And that's where I learned HTML, and JavaScript and CSS. And then I got pretty passionate about
those things. And then at one point, it was like, okay, it will be useful if the people in this team
could actually sign into this website as well. And we can have some private communications going
on as well. And I had someone that was kind of another key person in the team. And he learned
PHP. And then I basically just started learning PHP from him, learned it. And then before I knew,
I was like, okay, I'm kind of like full style web developer before that term was even being used.
But I really got into that and love that. And so yeah, I started building websites for other than
clients and things like that. But yeah, so that's kind of some interesting key aspect for me growing
up. That's such an interesting path to take to get into entrepreneurship, because I had a similar
path where I played a lot of online games, ended up creating sort of a guild online, needed a
website needed to program it. And at one hand, you're playing a game. But on the other hand,
you're getting all these skills with managing a team of people. And all this tech where you're
trying to build websites, you have all the same jobs that anyone really does at a normal company.
So I wonder how many founders have had a similar path. Yeah. I know you started at least one company
before you started buffer. What's the story behind that? And what are some things that
you learned from that experience? Yeah, so I, I had a startup before buffer. It came about because
I went to university to college, and I graduated, I did computer science. And by the end of it,
I knew pretty clearly that I wanted to try and make something happen. So I got a, I got a job as
a web developer. And I specifically was able to kind of negotiate to only work three days a week
for them. And I had these two days a week that I will be able to really try and make something
happen myself. And really, it was like three days or even four days a week. So the weekends as well
on on my own projects. And so the key idea like project that I worked on before buffer was called
one page. And we talked about it as like kind of your business card in the cloud slash single
web page for all of your online identities and contact information. So if anyone knows about like
about me, it was essentially that kind of concept. And yeah, I had a co founder for that I someone
that I met at university, who's also really into kind of tech, entrepreneurship and things. And so
we worked on it together for about a year. And I learned a ton of things made all the mistakes of
like, having the idea and just building it without really checking if anyone else had that problem
and things and me and my co founder at the time realized like, there's a few ways that we didn't
work well together, we had a lot of kind of bites and challenges and things. And we were living
together just to save money. We were like in this super cheap place. There was like cockroaches
around or just like bugs and stuff. It's just like it was, it was pretty bad. But yeah, and then
living together and having some of these issues as well was really interesting. But we were both
really passionate and wanted to make something happen. And we had a level of a few wins showing
it where you managed to get a little bit of like grants funding from those like a government kind
of program for new businesses. And so and then I met some great great mentors through it as well.
And one of the key things that happened was during doing that project, that startup, I also discovered
the lean startup concept. So it was actually every creases blog, startup lessons learned that I came
across before he was really doing a lot of speaking or well before the book. But I came across this
blog during that time. And I just got hooked immediately. I was like, every blog post was
waiting for it and excited and I would comment on things. And yeah, and I and I started to really
internalize those lean startup concepts, and realized that I wasn't using them very much for
the for the startup. And so yeah, so by the end of it, I think I was pretty well equipped. I
don't think I could have done buffer without having gone through that experience.
Let's talk about the early days of buffer. What made you decide to start this company? And how
did you come up with the idea at first? Yeah, so I worked on one page for about a year.
Me and my co founder decided that it didn't work that well between us. So we kind of separated
in a sense, and which is a tough thing to go through. And ultimately, I was left with continuing
one page. So and now I had this kind of like, bit of pressure and freedom in a sense to, to like,
change it up massively. So I immediately pivoted one page. And, and I was like, well,
we'd actually got about 10,000 users. So I felt like there was some value that people that I could
try and, you know, see if there's other problems they have and things. So I ended up like
experimenting with a way to scan business cards. And I got it all working with Amazon mechanical
Turk and stuff. And, and it started to get really interesting. And I was, I was more and more
trying to embrace the lean startup concepts, which are a lot harder to do in practice than
like when you read about it. So I started doing these experiments. And then I just found that
the margins were just so bad with like business card scanning and things. And I wasn't that
passionate about it, but it was like a natural kind of shift from, from what one page initially was
about. So I did that for a few months. And I think it was during that time that I had
probably the two years prior to that, I had been using Twitter a lot, like more and more. And by
that point, I'd maybe reached about 1,500 followers. And I remember maybe around like 800
followers, it just started to get really fun for me. And, you know, that's the point, I think,
where you point where you share something, then people will like reply to it and there'll be a
conversation or there'll be some kind of engagement on it. So I just started using Twitter more and
more. And I was sharing a lot of the learnings and blog posts, like all lean startup blog posts
and that kind of thing that was coming across. So I was doing a lot of like sharing content on
Twitter at that time, and just sharing my experiences and numbers and things like that as well.
And that's kind of when it all mixed together into this perfect storm of like, okay, the one page is
like not really working, I think I'm ready to do something else different from that. And then I was
like really getting into Twitter and seeing the potential of Twitter, like still pretty early
at that point. And then I that's basically where I had the idea of a buffer from was like, well,
I'm sharing these articles regularly. And I want to do it more because the more I do it, the more
people I'm finding that I'm able to meet from this. And I'd actually moved back to my hometown
at that point. And I was kind of like, I was in either my hometown or Birmingham in the UK,
I think it was in Birmingham in the UK, but it was not London where there's like a real startup
hub. And so in some ways, I was using Twitter to try and meet people that were in that city,
but maybe you know, there wasn't actually any startup events. So it was a way to try and like,
kind of pull these people out from the woodworks like let's let's all try and talk about what we're
doing here. And yeah, I've just at a point, there was a point where I was like, Oh, this is a problem
I have, like, I would actually like to share a lot more, these articles and things that I'm coming
across. But I was reading my content in like one or two different sessions in the day, maybe in the
morning, in the evening, like using Google Reader at the time. So I'd like do this reading in five
minutes, or you know, five, 10, 15 minutes of reading in the morning. And I would find, you know,
a bunch of articles that I wanted to share on Twitter. And then I started sharing them. And then
I realized fairly quickly, like, this is not great to just like blast my, like, Twitter, like
following with, you know, five or 10 articles in one go. That's the where the idea came from.
Basically, it was like, okay, I can easily build just a little scheduler and like con task to let
me just put these instead of putting these tweets immediately on Twitter, let me just put them into
a database, and then have this schedule thing that would just pulse me our database and share it
once an hour instead, so that I could put like 10 things in there, and they will get shared every
hour every two hours instead. But it is worth noting that at that point, I was kind of like,
had a little bit of burnout or just like from the experience of, of one page where
one page had really said, like, this is a startup, like, this is a company is going to be big, like,
we didn't charge any of the users anything, we were like trying to get funding, had some meetings
and stuff, and it didn't really work out. And also, I had this experience with the co founder,
who I'm still in touch with a really great guy, but it just didn't work. So I was a bit burned,
like feeling from those two things. So with buffer, I was like, not gonna make this mistake,
I'm gonna, this is just a project, it's a little thing, I'm gonna charge users, if I can, I'm gonna
try and be really disciplined to do it in the lean startup way. But this is just a project,
I'm not gonna make it like bigger than it is or needs to be initially. So, and at that point,
I'd run out of funds, like from this grant that we had. So I had to start getting web development
work again, I had two clients, I was actually working five days a week for the clients. So this
was really something I had to just fit in, in the sides. And yeah.
Well, despite that, you ended up going from really having no idea at all to having the idea and then
having paying customers, and something like seven weeks. And I asked people on the India
Aquas form if they had any questions for you. And David Lawson asked, if you remember how you
structured your day back then, and how many hours you're putting into development, and how many
hours you're putting into development, and marketing, and what that process was like of going from
nothing to your first paying customer?
Yeah, it's a great question. So I think it was definitely an interesting, somewhat of a struggle
period to find the time and the day and things. I think there's a few interesting things that come
to mind from that period of time. One is that I think the success in making it happen within
very much down to the lean startup concepts, because I tried to be super disciplined with
those. And it's what helped me to stop coding after the first couple of days of the excitement
of having the idea. And actually, I questioned myself, is this something that other people
would get value from? Is this something that is a true problem? Would people pay for it?
So the lean startup concepts helped me force me to stop just building, which is what's comfortable
and easy for me, and start having those conversations, start doing marketing to get those
conversations and things. It wouldn't have happened as fast if I hadn't taken that approach. And also,
the other thing has helped me to really be very thoughtful about cutting down scope. What is
really needed, and what is the goal? And I think with the lean startup concepts, the goal was
this idea of validated learning, of learning more about whether your assumptions are correct. Is this
idea going to work? And so I basically threw out a bunch of things that were not needed,
changing your password. And some of these things a framework might just do for you now,
but by then, had to be questioning all of these things. And even the payment process initially
was literally just a PayPal button that let you start a subscription. But none of the process of
like, it didn't even email the user that received a payment. It didn't even change their account to
be a paid account. So sometimes people are left for hours, they've started paying, like me,
for this product, and their account is still on the free plan. But all of those things were like,
why work on that, making that process really great when I don't even have the first customer yet.
Let's get the first customer and then do that.
Do you remember your exact process for how you found your first few customers and what those
conversations were like when you tried to convince them to pay for a very early buffer?
Yeah, it was. So this is a question that sometimes people ask me like, how should I
market? How do I get people to my landing page? Or what if I think in some ways, I look back and
think I was lucky, but I was also, it was the right thing for the product. So essentially,
Twitter was my channel for that. And so as lucky, I had been using Twitter for a while.
I had 1500, maybe 1700 followers by that point. So I had enough people on there that I could
actually share something and get a few people to visit the website. But also it was the right
channel, because this was literally a product for people doing, you know, sharing content or doing
marketing in a sense on Twitter. So yeah, it was just kind of a blend of like, look and the right
thing anyway, but that was how I initially shared and got people visiting the website. I also just
wanted to touch on the other part of the question that you mentioned before, which was like
structuring my day. And so I remember initially, I would do my work for clients in the, you know,
in the regular hours, they say wake up, do my client work from nine to five, those were like
the hours that build. And then in the evening, I would work on on buffer. And that had mixed
results. And I think sometimes I had enough energy and passion to like, do bits of work.
But actually, over the first couple of weeks of that seven week period, I think I found pretty
quickly that I was like, pretty drained from the day of working on other stuff, that didn't end up
like actually getting that much done on buffer. So one of the things that I did, which worked
really well for me at the time was I flipped it around and I started getting up early. So I wake
up early and work on buffer. And I had all the energy, had to sleep a little bit earlier, but I
would get up and do at least a couple of hours on buffer in the early morning and then and then I
would work on client work. And the client work, you know, was was not too challenging for me,
it was like, building websites, whereas I think buffer was way more challenging, because it was
like totally new, trying to be disciplined about lean startup, like trying to do marketing stuff
and different things, all things I didn't really have any experience about. So it just, you know,
I think it was really valuable for me to switch that around and be fresh in the morning for that.
So that's the least thing that worked well for me, and was probably like a pretty big factor in
making it happen in seven weeks. So what are some of the biggest milestones that you had in those
first few months or maybe just a few years of working on buffer? Yeah. So the biggest early
success was getting so after this seven weeks process, and I'd been like having conversations
with a lot of potential users and customers during that time, and built up the confidence in myself,
like, oh, I should build this, getting enough validation that people are saying they'll use it,
some people are saying they'll pay for it, and then launched it. And when I say launch, it was,
you know, a very, very basic product. At that point, it would only work for one Twitter account,
and things like that. But yeah, launched it. And the first huge win was getting the first paying
customer after three days of launch. That was a huge moment for me. And it's kind of funny to
look back on because that first customer basically started a $5 a month subscription on that day.
So I literally only got $5 in my PayPal account. But that was just a momentous moment for me.
I was jumping around the room in excitement. And it's funny to think back because I was like doing
in a website, web development, client work, and making, you know, way more than that in a week.
But I think it was the fact that it was like recurring revenue, and it was from a product.
So that was a big step for me is like moving away from charging for my time,
and charging for a product. And that was just so clear to me at that moment. It's like, wow,
this is this is big, like I've achieved something I've been striving for for a long time. So that
was a huge win. Then first month revenue was $20 in total had three more paying customers. And the
rest of the month, very, very small amount of revenue in the first month. But it was it was
kind of like a slow burn. And so I was still doing client work for several more months. And then my
co founder, Leo, joined me in about maybe a month, or yeah, about a month or month and a half, two
months after I launched. And so this is like, three, four months after I'd started. And it was
right at the point when I was realizing that I needed to balance my time between marketing and
development. And and it would be easy for me to keep developing the product further. And that's
easy for me, like that's what I know how to do. But the fact that I had these four paying customers
made me realize like, oh, like there's something here. And even in this very minimal form,
it's valuable enough that these four people have decided to start paying. So if that's the case,
there must be a lot more people out there that would also have similar problems and be able to
get value and pay for it. So that was when I decided like, oh, I need to actually start focusing
on marketing in some ways. And I started doing it myself for a few weeks. And then that's when Leo
just got in touch with me, we'd known each other for a while from university, we'd always had like
different projects that we'd worked on individually. And he just checked in. And I think we were like
chatting on Skype at that point. And he said, How's it going? What's what's going on? And I said,
Well, this is new project. And it's actually starting to work like I've got some paying
customers, it's pretty exciting. But I need to like, manage my time. I still didn't have much
time at that point. So yeah, so he said, you know, I could do I could do some marketing I could do,
maybe I can try doing some of this. And we started off very lightweight. But yeah, he jumped on
board. And it worked really well. And it was it was great. And so the next big milestone was
really, I'd say Leo figuring out that marketing side. And so he did a bunch of different
experiments, different channels and things, it was really just like him, trying everything. And we,
we figured out that now you would call it content marketing. And we basically figured out that was
a huge opportunity and driver for us. So yeah, I think we in the first month I mentioned we got
these four customers, we had about 100 free users sign up overall. And then over the course of the
next five months or so Leo and his efforts on content marketing helped us grow to 100,000
free users, and revenue, revenue about maybe $5,000 a month. That's me like that. I mean,
one of the big milestones within that was the moment that I could start to drop my client work.
So I distinctly remember having $1,200 a month as a huge like milestone. Like, that's when like,
I could start to pay my rent from this and like start to drop that work and things. So yeah,
those are some of the early milestones in the first year.
And you guys still do a lot of content marketing today. I mean, you guys write a ton,
you publish a lot of transparent stats on Twitter, you're constantly talking about like,
what's going on in your business? How has your strategy for reaching
new customers and getting more people on a buffer changed over time since the beginning?
Yeah, I think we have a lot more channels now, we've figured out a lot more things.
And we really have a full marketing team now and reaching millions of uniques a month. So
it's really grown a ton over time. But the core principles are still there and still alive and
well in our strategy today. And those who are putting place like pretty early on. Yeah,
it's really about like, how can we deliver great value upfront and be generous with our
knowledge and insights and then getting that audience in from that and driving the signups.
And it goes hand in hand with having freemium model as well, making it really easy for anyone
to just sign up for free or start a trial of one of the paid plans for free. And then
we're driving this big audience and then we want to have like a pretty wide top of the funnel to
let people come in and try it out as well. Are there any things you guys have tried that
just didn't work at all? Yeah, we have tried a bunch of things. I think, I mean,
especially remember early on, we were trying so many different things before we even landed at
content marketing where we were trying to reach out and get press and then just like fell flat
on its face. And we started to figure some of that out a bit more over time. We've also tried
paid acquisition. And we really not figured that out yet. So that might just be our own
lack of skills there and things. But we've tried that multiple times. And to this day,
we do very little, you know, Facebook ads, Google ads, these kinds of things.
One thing that sets you guys apart is just how transparent you are. You are one of the most,
if not the most transparent companies that I know of. You share how much revenue you're generating,
you share how much you pay your employees, you share your customer return rates and things like
that. How do you think about being transparent? What are some of the advantages and disadvantages?
And why is this something you choose to do? Yeah, thanks. It's definitely one of the
most kind of fun aspects for me. And I think it really just came from a place of
having a desire to share these things and feeling like that's the right thing to do.
Like it just makes sense. It made sense to me to be open about as much as possible,
even from the very early days. So and it's actually interesting that in some ways,
it relates directly back to the product, which was initially I was sharing a lot on Twitter
about my own experiences and ups and downs and things. So yeah, and then in the first year of
Buffer, when I started to have some of that success, I was sharing on Twitter, even this
is back in the early part of 2011, I was sharing the numbers like number of signups and revenue
and these things. And I think there was a moment where me and Leo talked and said, like, should
we do this? Is this like, no one else really does this. But we just felt like, oh, this is like a
really good thing to do. And I would sometimes meet with founders. And I found that if I just
shared everything about Buffer, they would tensor them maybe share some numbers about their
company. And we would just have far more fruitful conversation where we could help each other
a lot more. And then over time, I think we've we started to recognize the huge power of that
for the team and for customers, especially in terms of building trust. So we found that by being
really open and transparent in the team about about all the things going on, when we've raised
funding rounds, we've basically made every email viewable for the whole team. We've had acquisition
offers, we've shared them fully and shared our whole thought process and a bunch of different
things. And then we've had tough moments. Buffer was hacked and we shared it really early with
customers before we even knew the full extent of it and things. And so it also extends to customers
where we've had tough times and we've generally tried to be very open and transparent all along
the way about everything. And I think that's built up this trust and this really kind of tight knit
customer base who are right there with us whenever something challenging does come up for us. And
that's pretty hard to scale and maintain at scale. And I think it's something that that's something
we strive for. And I think we've managed to keep some of that over time. So it was also a big moment
for us when we decided to articulate and put into words our values. And we did this around,
I think it was in 2013 or so. And when we did that, we knew that transparency would be a value,
but we decided to phrase it as default to transparency, which is this idea that let's
flip it around and say, you know, everything is transparent, unless there's a really good reason
why it shouldn't be. That's what triggered us to share our salaries transparently. And
a lot of other things came from that moment forward, where we kind of put it into writing
and said, like, default to transparency. It made us question a lot of things across the company and
say, could we be more transparent about this in order to live fully up to the value? And so then
we started sharing salaries, equity, even more numbers and things like that.
One thing that keeps a lot of founders up at night is that many of us are building on top of
other people's platforms. We're building on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. And buffer
is no exception. How do you think about mitigating the risk that comes with building on other
platforms? And have you ever had any big scares? Yeah, that's a great question. I would say it
would probably be up there as one of the biggest risks to buffer. So I think about it a lot.
Obviously, we are built on top of, we're largely built on top of Facebook and Twitter at this
point. And that's what we provide products to help customers to make use of those platforms
for their small businesses. And there's definitely been some interesting twists and turns in the
journey of these network APIs. Twitter has had a bunch of different changes that have made their
API along the way, and Facebook has as well. I think that one of the ways I think about it is,
I mean, there's been changes along the way where I know that if you think back to Twitter in 2011,
2012, 2013, there was so many Twitter clients that you could use to actually read tweets and
things. And today, there's very few third party Twitter clients. And I think even there's new
API challenges and things going on right now, I think that might impact even some of the less
remaining Twitter clients. I think that one of the challenges you have to think about is,
how do you really align yourself with those platforms if you're built on top of them?
That's something we've strived really hard to do. And I think the fact that
in the early days was more about contributing content to the platform rather than consuming
and reading tweets and things, that helped us to be aligned more with the platform. Because
obviously, with their ad-based model, they need to have that control over the consuming of their
feed. And then, also, I think there's always these opportunities to really push the boundaries
of what the network allows through the API. And this is something we've seen even more recently,
to take another example is, Twitter made some changes to their rules around automation and
stuff. And so, in some sense, you can say, well, buffers isn't a buffer. That's what it's for. It's
for automation. So in that, have a huge impact. But actually, what we found is that in the last
few years, there's some other startups that have pushed the boundaries of that automation within
Twitter and let you really just say, upload some content and we'll just continually share it on
Twitter for you. Or we'll just continually share content from your blog for you and things. And
we've actually had a lot of requests for this kind of thing over the years. We never went too far
with it. I think it's just about having you want to have your own stance in addition to what the
network might allow. So I kind of visualize it as like, the network gives us these boundaries
of APIs of what we can work within. And we always try with buffer to be not pushing to the edges of
those boundaries, but just sitting within it and having our own stance on things.
That's helped a lot along the way, where we never pushed too far with automation. And now
they've changed the rules around that a little bit. And then the other thing is, of course,
is just having really good relationships with them. So we are an official Instagram marketing
partner. We have a good relationship with Facebook. We have contacts that people we can speak to
there. We go to the Facebook conference each year, similarly at Twitter. And we also, for
a couple of our products, which they pay Twitter for data access as well. And so there's a number
of different things that we do to try and be well aligned and be a good partner to those networks.
But it's still a key factor. I think these days, it's actually interesting. I've spoken
to some of the founders where I've always felt like, oh, maybe if we weren't on top of
Facebook and Twitter, maybe it will be a lot less stressful and things. But then I've talked to some
of the founders which are essentially not necessarily built on top of anything. But
you always have your struggles and your challenges and things. I've spoken to many founders who have
just as many other challenges. So it's just like which challenges you end up with.
I brought this up earlier, but you guys have a wide range of products that you're working on,
not just one. How do you maintain your vision as you expand into new areas? And how do you
decide what products to build and whether or not to do new things versus doubling down on what
you already have? Yeah, I personally find vision to be very interesting. I think that it's important
to keep refreshing vision and having a clear vision to work towards, especially as your team
goes. That's extremely important for the team to understand the vision, be brought into it, be
part of defining it in some ways, but also guiding them with a vision. But I would say
sometimes I think there's this idea that you need to have this huge grandiose vision from day one
and it can't change at all. And I think in some ways, the vision shouldn't change that frequently.
But if I'm totally honest, when I started Buffer, my vision was, can I build a product that I can
work full-time on and not do fine work? And so that was a pretty strong vision for me. At the
time, it was one that I was very passionate about. It's not really a vision that a 70-person team
that you are paying full-time to be working on something could really get excited about.
But I think today, we just see this huge opportunity to expand further and provide
more value and bring the buffer way of doing things, both in terms of marketing and products
and customer service. We believe that we strive to create great products and provide better than
expected customer service and do it with really genuine and generous marketing.
We saw this opportunity to expand. And so about two years ago, we really started that effort.
And about a year ago, we really kicked it up an auction. So Buffer has really been one product
for most of the journey. And today, we have two separate products that are both very early stages.
Our revenue is $18 million. And one of these products generates about half a million of the
$18 million. And then the other product is brand new and is generating about $500 a month in
revenue right now. So very early stages. But the overall approach is I really am keen to maintain
the quality that we have. So we want to have a high-quality product. But we also want to provide
more overall more value to customers and solve more problems for customers. We're choosing not
to have one product and one suite. And we've bring everything into that, one dashboard and things.
Because we feel like we will not be able to maintain the quality of the experience if we do that.
So we're kind of creating like, we want to strive for multiple best of pre-products and really be
mindful about when we expand and what we add in and things.
So Buffer recently became profitable, but not for the first time. How important is profitability
to you compared to growth? And what are some of the steps that you've taken to ensure that
Buffer can become a profitable company?
Interestingly, I think in many ways profitability is just built into the DNA of Buffer.
So right from the beginning, I mentioned OnePage, this previous product that I had.
OnePage, I tried to raise some funding and failed and things and it was never generating any revenue.
And then Buffer, day three, having the first revenue come in, it was really a change of mindset
from thinking like, oh, maybe I can get investment to fund my ability to work on this, to saying
I've tried that and it failed and I don't have the track record, I don't have the expertise,
I don't know how to do that. So I'm going to have to build something that people pay for,
that's the only way I'm going to be able to work on this full time.
So really just started off with that DNA and then over time we had this opportunity to raise
some funds and we did that and it's really been, we've done two rounds of funding and
both times we've been profitable prior to the funding round. So it's kind of been like
the default of profitability, raise funding and that puts us into not being profitable for a while
and then working our way back to profitability. But it's also been a lot of learnings around
like taking investment and the implications of that. This also led me to feel that actually
in the long run now, I'd rather keep profitable and that will allow us to actually experiment
more and really take things in our own path and our own direction.
Yeah, being profitable opens up such a world of possibilities where you can go in pretty much
whatever direction you want. Whereas when you've raised money and expanded your team,
you're only two options are to focus on either getting back to profitability so your company
won't die or to focus on raising another round. You've mentioned a few times how in the early
days you were following the lessons from the lean startup. You still follow those practices
and how do you think about becoming a better founder and building a better company?
And what are some lessons that early stage founders can take away from what you've learned?
Yeah, I believe so in terms of the lean startup practices, we really try and still apply those
today. And interestingly, I think a lot of people think about lean startup for engineering or
product. And I think it applies much more widely than that. So we generally try and take this
philosophy of like, what's our ideal outcome? And what are our assumptions? Can we validate
that in a small way and then expand it out? So I think it's a very cost effective kind of lean
way to just run a company. And I think over time, obviously more people have joined the team. And
my role switched from being kind of a practitioner, a bit of lean startup to being a coach for lean
startup in the team. And that's a role I really enjoyed. And I think we're seeing some great
results from that, especially in the last year or so. And so then that allows me to kind of also
step to a slightly higher level and think about some bigger things of like, okay, what's the big
vision or strategy and working with all the different areas and things. So yeah, that's kind
of, but it's still very much alive and well, like this new product that we have that's generating
$500 a month revenue feels in many ways, like the beginning, early days, again, there's a few
different differences when you already have a product and you have a company and it sits within
that. And so in terms of like distribution, we have this big advantage, right of like existing,
you know, 80,000 paying customers already, and a lot of free users. And so that's not really our
challenge anymore. We don't have to go crazy about the content marketing and stuff like we
did in the early days for this new product that we have. But so we actually kind of have to like,
stop the distribution and control it in some ways. But we still need to be very disciplined
about the being startup concepts. And we've launched that product kind of at a very early
state and things. And so yeah. Cool. Well, it's been great having you on.
Is there anything else you'd like to say? Or could you tell the listeners where they can go to
find out more about what you're working on and what you're doing at Buffer? Yeah, absolutely.
So you can find me at Joel.is. And that's my website. So Joel is. And also on Twitter,
Joel Gasquin. That's my username is just my full name. And yeah, I have my email on my website and
things. And I'm always happy to hear from others that are trying to get something off the ground.
I love to help with those things. And you can also just like, ask me anything on Twitter as well.
So I love to be in touch. But yeah, and the other thing is we are growing the team and we're doing
some fun stuff at Buffer as well. So of course, I would love to hear from anyone that might be
interested there. But thanks so much, Kotlin, for the time and the great questions and great
conversation. It's been a lot of fun. Thanks so much, Joel. If you enjoyed
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